Volume 52, Number 14 · September 22, 2005
Domestic Gothic
By Joyce Carol Oates
Whenever she tried out a new typewriter, Jean Stafford typed this oracular remark from Everyman, the medieval morality play in which, as an undergraduate at the University of Colorado in the early 1930s, she'd played the role of Good Deeds. Recalling the experience decades later, in the preface to the 1971 reprint of her novel The Mountain Lion, Stafford notes with characteristic irony: 'I spoke [Good Deeds's] lines because I had (and have) the voice of an undertaker.'
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